Wittgenstein does not sound much like a guy I’d want to hang out with. His difficult nature reminds me a bit of Charles S. Peirce. Indeed, both Wittgenstein and Peirce come to philosophy from mathematics, both forever insisted they could not be understood, both were difficult friends, and both lived rather poorly (Wittgenstein by choice; Peirce by lack of work).

I wonder if there is a biography on Peirce available that is as good as Monk’s on Wittgenstein.

Gorman’s goal for Inhabiting the Cruciform God is to unpack “the claim that cruciformity is theoformity, or theosis” (2).

Behind it are a couple of other claims developed elsewhere:

1. God is cruciform.

2. Christian spirituality, holiness, conformity to Christ is cruciformity, or a step further, it is inhabiting the cruciform God.

3. And thus, cruciformity is theoformity, deification, divinization, or theosis.

We can read a series of conditional sentences in Gorman’s unpacking of his ultimate claim in subsequent chapters:

1. If kenosis reveals God’s character and if God is cruciform then kenosis summons us to theosis.

2. If justification is by co-crucifixion or participation in the cruciform narrative of Christ, which, you will recall is God’s character, then justification is theosis.

3. If holiness is conformity to God’s cruciform character, and if justification is theosis, then holiness is the actualization of justification and is appropriately referred to as theosis.

Gorman focuses the better part of the introduction introducing his readers to theosis—”Kenosis is familiar to us, and justification we know, but what in the world is theosis?” (3)

“[T]he burden of this book,” Gorman writes, is “to make it clear that Paul’s experience of Christ was precisely an experience of God in se, and that we must either invent of borrow theological language to express that as fully and appropriately as possible” (4). Theosis as “transformative participation in the kenotic, cruciform character of God through Spirit-enabled conformity to the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected/glorified Christ” is language that expresses Paul’s experience of Christ as an experience of God, according to Gorman. And with that, Gorman in the following chapters sets about to argue for the protasis and thus the apodosis of each of the conditional sentences above.

I’ve been exploring the many different websites that can be used to catalog personal libraries. There are several that are book-specific and some that allow you to catalog just about any purchased item. I plan to put together a post with short reviews of several of these sites sometime in the near future.

Recently, in my exploration, I came across boxedup. Nothing particular about it sets it apart from the rest as far as I can tell. But for some reason I started a list of the books I’ve edited since I’ve been at Wipf & Stock (coming up on two years now). If you are interested, you can see the books in the “Things I Edited” list on my boxedup page.

This kind of stuff scares the crap out of me. How does the American Patriot’s Bible do anything for the kingdom of God, which, by the way is not synonymous with the kingdom of America? I am ashamed—as a Christian and an American—this book exists. Others have expressed their opinions on the matter as well.

And, I should add, Richard G. Lee and others who actually think this sort of thing is godly are simply delusional. Someone who writes under the auspices of Mental Health Examiner ought to recognize delusion. Unfortunately, this writer does not.